I was looking at houses for sale online. One house would have been gorgeous, except the owners had a particular icon all over the house. It was a little eyeless character that resembled a gingerbread man. I don't know if they made him up, he's a famous carton or even a religious / political icon I've never heard of. Eyeless Gingerbread Man was in every.single.room. The dining room had a mirror hung up. All the way around the mirror, painted on the wall, were 2 foot tall rows of Eyeless Gingerbread Men holding hands and screaming.

When we first began house hunting, we came upon a listing for a home that advertised, among other things, a roof in excellent condition. We went to the house and since it was unoccupied, walked around the house. The roof in front was, indeed, in very nice condition. However, in the rear of the house, literally half the roof was missing. Just...gone. Someone had tried to cover it with a tarp, but the damage was extensive. So now we joke about obviously broken or flawed things being in "excellent condition".

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"From a procrastination standpoint, today has been wildly successful."

Excellent condition, huh? Sounds like the object I collect and frequently find at antique stores labeled as being in excellent condition even though half the paint is missing and there are scratches all over it.

One house I toured when looking to move had shag carpeting in every room. A different color in every room. The best was the bedroom with pink shag, and green and pink walls and ceilings. It felt like being inside a watermelon. I did like the one bedroom with blue shag carpeting and wallpapers with blue and white paper with rubber duckies.

Our house had "Spirit of 76" wallpaper in the living room when we first moved in. It's painted over now but I thought it was pretty funny.

Another house we looked at had a furnace in the basement that gave me flashbacks of Sweeney Todd, and another one we peeked into (didn't even go into the house) had parts of the ceiling resting on the floor.

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Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. Be cheerful, strive to be happy. -Desiderata

The first is family homes with carpeted eating areas. Seriously? Judging by the bedrooms, there are toddlers in the home.Carpets? Under the chairs? Hope they own a rug cleaner!

The other one is carpeted bathrooms. By this I mean shag carpeting everywhere, even around the commode.Splashed biologicals on carpet and no way to clean it?Eww. Just...eww.

My favourite was an acreage we wanted to check out. The realtor looked at us oddly and said "Do you like trains?" in what I can only describe as a psychoticly cheery tone.Turns out there was a train track about 50 feet from the front door.A bit too close for me, thanks.

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"I think her scattergun was only loaded with commas and full-stops, although some of them cuddled together for warmth and produced little baby colons and semi-colons." ~ Margo

The reactions to a wallpaper in my grandparents house when it was being sold. Having grown up in the house I'd never really noticed it and no one else in the family had either, it was in a little used craft room. They were 1 inch high little black stick figures on a white background dancing around little stick fires. Doesn't sound bad but they were stick figures of both genders and they were quite graphic and realistic about which genders they were. I mean really graphic, certain things round and third err legs included. I think my grandmother had a cheeky sense of humor as that room was her personal craft room. I wonder where she found the wallpaper.

When we were first told about it by an eagle eye potential buyer there was a bit of a uproar about what to do about it. In the end it was left alone but dang it was funny. 30 years and no one had noticed. Wish I had a picture. Apparently it was the first thing to go when the new owners took possession.

Not me personally, but when a few friends of mine were looking for a student house, they discovered a toilet in a very odd place.

In the bathroom, there was an empty space where the toilet should have been. The pipes were there, just no actual toilet. The toilet was in the garden, and filled with earth, with a basil plant in the bowl.

Apparently, the landlord (who was showing them round) was just as surprised as they were. The funniest thing though, was that (rather than being incandescently furious), the landlord was more impressed that they'd managed to get the toilet through the house and into the garden in one piece!!! Still, no idea why they'd done it.

With my DH being a general contractor he gets called in when people buy a new house and it has a feature that *has* to go. There's only two that come to my mind immediately, but he's told be about dozens of others

The first was the house where the entire downstairs had really nice crown molding that went through each room, hall, etc. Apparently it was stained a lovely color and would have looked nice....but it had been installed 6 inches below the ceiling....and upside down

The second was a gorgeous house that had been custom built by the original owner. I actually got to see this one myself when DH went in to work on it when the 2nd owner bought it. The house was absolutely beautiful. Except there was a minor ( ) design flaw, somebody had goofed. You could only get to the kitchen through the garage or by walking through a half bathroom. He fixed it. THEN the house was awesome.

My parents' house where I grew up had bright Christmasy red carpet and red flocked wallpaper. They couldn't afford to replace it when they moved in, so my early childhood memories involved playing dolls on the floor of Dante's Inferno.

The houses DH and I saw while we were house-hunting were pretty normal, but the smells. One place, they had a dog and the owner was cooking something tomato-based on the stove. That would've been kind of okay, except the owner also had a blueberry scented candle lit. Not a good combo.

My parents' house where I grew up had bright Christmasy red carpet and red flocked wallpaper. They couldn't afford to replace it when they moved in, so my early childhood memories involved playing dolls on the floor of Dante's Inferno.

When my brother and his wife were house hunting years ago, they were shown a custom built house that had not been finished before the owners were transferred out of state...I saw it...It was round, had a domed roof, no doors or windows, and was painted bright orange! It fell down during a major storm sometime later!

The house they did buy had zebra stripe curtains, bright red carpeting, and the back yard had fallen leaves that had been there for years.

The house that my wife and I bought in 1994 had a kitchen with yellow and silver metallic wallpaper and a yellow window blind, a bedroom with Victorian advertisement wallpaper, and bright green shag rug everywhere. We found out after we bought...a major basement leak, illegal plumbing, and shoddy electrical work. When we sold it in February, we discovered that the previous owners had made extensive renovations (part of the reason we bought the place) without benefit of city building permits/inspections. I had to quickly make a diagram of all three floors and get zoning/building approvals for $XXX five days before the sale. That explained why I had never gotten a copy of the CO that I requested after I discovered it was missing from the stack of paperwork from the purchase!

The first house DH and I looked at was a converted shop with a "roof terrace", something that sounded quite impressive in an area of terraced houses in Leeds.

The first thing we saw was the extremely narrow and tight spiral staircase coming up from the centre of the living room into the ceiling. This was the only way to get upstairs from the inside. You may well ask how on earth anyone was supposed to, say, get a bed up there? Well, that was where the roof terrace came in. The main bedroom (which was just large enough for a double bed, if you didn't mind it hitting the wall on both sides) opened out onto the roof of the kitchen, which had had a set of steps attached at the side. Presumably we were expected to clamber up there with a flatpack and a mattress.

But that wasn't all.

From the moment we walked in we could see the discoloration on the kitchen walls, and once we were upstairs the problem was obvious. The drainage on the kitchen roof hadn't been set up properly, so the roof terrace was full of water which was seeping into the walls. It wasn't so much a terrace as a paddling pool.

We just saw a house in excellent and restored condition. Restored to the 1970's that is.

Orange shag carpeting, avocado green stove, burgundy fridge, and on and on. When confronted with, the realtor said, "Yes it is restored by hiring a maid for a deep cleaning. Everything is in excellent condition."

Um no thank you and we left. A year and half later the house is still for sale and still in excellent restored condition.

(in case people think,those can be changed out. The pricing on the house was comparable to the houses in the same street that had hardwood floors, granite counters in kitchens with chef appliances and the price was firm, not negotiable)

This is pretty small compared to the other stuff on here - but my BIL and SIL's kitchen has room only for a small counter-top dishwasher. Which sits in an small alcove that juts out from the side of the building, like A/C's do... really bizarre. Apparently the house came that way. The alcove is exactly the size of the dishwasher.

When we were starting to look for a house, we saw:A beautiful 1800's farmhouse with a huge family room addition - the weird feature - a huge hot tub in the family room!!A home that was a Tavern in the 1700's that still had the original tavern door in the kitchen (that was more cool than wierd)The house we bought - had "lovely" fruit wallpaper on the kitchen walls

Weird stuff in houses my parents actually bought-The row house in Philadelphia - circa 1971, one of the dining room walls was wallpapered with aluminum foil (like from a roll of reynolds wrap) shiny side outThe house in NJ - the wall by the front door was covered in wood shake siding (like you would have on the outside of your house)One wall in the living room, and one wall in the kitchen was covered in cork tiles, brown/orange shag tile in the family room, carpet in the main bathroom and in the kitchen. They bought the house in the '90's and it looked like it was decorated in the 60's - we nicknamed it the "brady bunch house" cuz that's what it reminded us of!!